Shuttle SB51G

Manufacturer
Shuttle
shuttle.jpg
Website
Price
$800
Rating
Your rating: None

Comes with the following in the box:
1 Mainboard User manual
1 Mainboard CD-Driver
1 XPC Installation Guide
1 I.C.E Technology CPU heat-pipe
1 FDD Cable
1 HDD Cable
1 CD-ROM Cable
1 Power cord
Screws
Twin Adhesive
Friendly Front Feet

The motherboard comes standard with the following:

Front Panel:
2 USB
1 Line-out/Headphone
1 MIC
1 1394
1 SPDIF out (aka 5.1 surround out)

Back Panel:
2 Serial Port
2 1394
2 USB
1 LAN
1 SPDIF in (aka 5.1 surround in)
1 Line-out/Headphone
1 MIC
1 Line-in
VGA
M & KB

1 PCI
1 AGP

Parallel Port & Video Out are optional - costs extra

The audio connections on the back also act is surround outs L/R front and back and center.

I added the following:
p4/2.4GHZ ($160)
512MB PC2700 Ram ($102)
120GB HD ($136)
Matrox G550 Dual-Head ($80 on ebay)
CD-Rom Drive (already had it)

$800 total.

Aside from the size factor and having big hands, putting this thing together was a joke. If you've never built a computer before, the manual has a section for newbies. If you're a pro at this sort of thing, theres a section for major BIOS tweaks also. In total it took me about 45 minutes to put the whole thing together and get it turned on. OS installation was a breeze with W2K. The drivers on the supplied CD installed easily and seemed to not interfere with anything.

I installed 1 120GB hard drive and theres still room for another if need be. If you remove the CD-Rom you'd have room for a third. With a LAN to transfer clips form another machine, you could probably get away with removing the CD drive if you needed the extra HD space.

I installed 1 512 stick of 2700 RAM. Theres space for 2 sticks and the mother board can accomodate 2GB worth, so theres plenty of room for upgrade there. For CPU power I chose to use a p4/2.4 for now because of my budget, though the board excepts up to 3.0 with Hyper Threading support.

The onboard video actually isn't so bad if you're not using major 3D applications. I'm not an overclocker so I don't spend my time doing benchmark tests but I tried Quake 3 on it @ 1024x768 at all the highest detail settings and it seemed pretty damn fast to me! I added the Matrox G550 card because of its video out quality & low price.

To give you an idea of its performance, running Resolume I can overlap 3 layers of 720 x 480 DV video with blends in realtime through the video out with little framerate loss.

I tested the onboard firewire with a Sony digicam and Resolume and theres a delay of about 1 - 1.5 seconds.

Pros:
Smaller than a desktop, portable
Reasonable price
Easy to build for the somewhat computer savvy

Cons:
Not as portable as a laptop, still need a monitor
Minimum expandability
May not be easy to build for the inexperienced.